


Asleep and Dreaming

by nimblermortal



Category: Norse Mythology, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Death but not character death, Gen, Oneshot, ladies being awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki couldn't live with the humiliation of having been tricked, so he went to his daughter and begged her to make the problem go away. Hel laughed in his face. Eventually, though, her protection has to come to an end.</p><p>I have no idea what I was on when I wrote that summary. I think I meant Loki is embarrassed about Natasha tricking him, so he asks Hel to kill her, and Hel does not agree. I think I intended to make this a series or at least longer, detailing an increasingly intimate relationship between Hel and Natasha, in which they disagree about when/whether Natasha should die, until, of course, she does. But I didn't write any of that. Sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asleep and Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, this is the first scene of what turns into a romance between Hel and Natasha, but I'm not going to write the rest. It's bittersweet and pining on Hel's side; she wants to take Natasha home and keep her forever, and knows that the one gift she can give Natasha is not to do so. Natasha just takes it as it comes.

When Natasha first saw the woman, she assumed it was a dream, and she quietly applauded her subconscious for its efforts. How very appropriate, how symbolic, that the woman’s left side should be crisp bone from the top of the head to the last toe. There was not a hint of decay in the break; a clean edge, an abrupt separation. In the darkness, Natasha could not see if the blood ran smoothly along that line, passing in and out of emptiness, but that was fair enough. She didn’t know in life, either. But how appropriate that this woman should come at night, when the shadows hid things, and say nothing for a long time.

“So this is it,” she said at last, her voice sweet as the tingle of a bell in a graveyard: _Help me, I’m buried alive_. “The woman who tricked the god of lies.”

Natasha didn’t say anything. She didn’t like to speak before she had the measure of her opponent, even in her dreams, and she didn’t feel confident making snap decisions about creatures made with half the usual amount of flesh.

“He was furious, you know,” the woman said, sinking onto the bed beside Natasha. She ran her hand down Natasha’s arm, the bone cool against her skin. “He came storming down to my realm, demanding that I take special care of you. And I did, sweet. You didn’t think a little woman alone with her peashooters in a city at war would really survive? He asked that I be sure you die before the tale could be spread, and I made sure you lived to tell it.”

Her hand came to rest in Natasha’s lap. Natasha slipped her own over it, not flinching at the touch of bone. She saw the flicker of astonishment in the woman’s eyes; no liar, this one.

“Hel,” she said.

“You know me,” said the woman.

“I ought to recognize my own goddess,” said Natasha. Hel laughed, softly, the sound falling out one side of her mouth and into the shadows. That gave Natasha time to reach up and touch her jaw, forming a link between the two sides of Hel’s body, bone under her left hand and skin under her right. A living bridge, which was just as well; Natasha could kill as easily with her left hand as with her right. She had always been that bridge.

Hel stood up, slipping free of Natasha’s touch. Natasha let her hands fall gently onto the sheets, making no sound.

“You can’t cheat death,” Hel said. “No trickery, no gambling, no bribes will work on me.”

“I am not trying to trick you,” Natasha said.

“I have come to take back my blessing,” said Hel. Natasha nodded, once, and felt the brush of half a kiss on her forehead. She tilted her head into it, but Hel was gone before she shifted.

Natasha lay back down and drifted back to sleep as easily and dreamlessly as she always had.


End file.
